mapping, landscapes, and you.

Thursday, August 06, 2009

they're almost done. In one year, they'll be releasing the results of a decade-long survey of ocean species called The Census of Marine Life. The LA Times just did an article about this amazing project (with nifty photos):

The scientists set three goals. First, they would build a global
registry of every marine life form, worms to walruses, as a baseline
for research and public policy. Second, they would map where each
species lives and travels to better understand its habitat. Lastly,
they would assess the relative abundance of each organism -- past,
present and future.

Most marine biologists are specialists who
work alone or in small groups. The census has changed that. About 2,000
scientists in 80 countries have joined forces in the largest
collaboration in the history of ocean science. ...

"This was a field
in need of a revolution," said Ann Bucklin, who heads the marine
sciences department at the University of Connecticut. "It has opened up
global oceanography."

By next year, the online database will contain photos, DNA codes and
websites for at least 230,000 unique species, including more than
16,000 fish, scientists said. ...

The
list would be longer, but researchers used DNA analysis to cut more
than 50,000 "aliases" -- different names for the same creature -- from
the species list. The worst case of multiple identity was a breadcrumb
sponge, Halichondria panacea, which had 56 names around the world. Now it will have one.

The whole project cost $650,000,000 (yes, that's millyuns.) I love the scope of the project alone. And the fact that it's (aptly) being compared to mapping the human genome. I love that this brings together my two original obsessions: taxonomy and mapping. But you know (you know) what I love the most. That's right, the actual maps.

The one above is an interactive map of the projects they're running. Click on the dots to get an incomprehensible overview.Here's one of the cooler maps. Created by satellite tagging 47 white sharks, they discovered an area of concentrated activity between Hawaii and Baja they call the "White Shark Cafe." Awesome. Unless you're a surfer.

There are also a number of super depressing ones like this one, which tracks the "relative abundance of marine life by human cultural period," and another one which shows concentrations of life in the ocean in 1960 and 1990. But you knew there couldn't be a marine-life census without a save-the-whales mentality, didn't you?

But this brings me right back to one of my originary questions: what is this obsession with quantifying and charting everything? I mean, I know what it is: it's useful; it's necessary. We can't do science, we can't understand ourselves or the world without numbers and measuring and diagrams and charts. And maps. And that's part of it. But there's also the intuitive obsession, the part that just loves binding the world in the lines drawn on a piece of paper. Not needs to, loves to. It's what we drool over in these blogs.

And the lines aren't the same as the artist's lines, although we draw them quite beautifully, often. The lines aren't there for their own sake, but for their relationship to something in the real world: a number of actual creatures, a route of actual migration of actual creatures, an area of concentration of scaly, cold, swishy bodies. And yet we love the lines more than we love the slimy, cold bodies; as much as we love what they mean.

Thursday, April 30, 2009

i don't know why I didn't post this back in February when I found it. Probably had some grand plans for commentary which collapsed in the face of actual paying work. I have, of course, also lost track of the source of this link.

This is another item--the quirkiness of collective nouns--that has become popular and trendy lately. I've seen lists of collective nouns in recent quirkster books and mentioned in various quirkster contexts. I'd hesitate to align myself with the forces of collective quirk ... only, it's a database!

I like a "hand" of bananas and a "stare" or a "parliament" of owls (both are so appropriate, no?)

Friday, May 16, 2008

i'm trying to discover the history of the discovery of mutation for my novel.

In the novel, which takes place at the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century, the characters are on Mars without adequate protection from radiation, so they're all dying of radiation sickness and don't know it. (It's complicated.)

When did people start understanding genetic mutation?

In the course of researchy googling, I came across this diagram to the left. I have no idea what it means, but it looks cool.

I wonder, do we have a mechanistic view of the universe because our science makes it seem that way, or do we have a mechanistic view of the universe because our most obvious metaphors for physical processes are machines, and then we draw diagrams that make stuff look like machines?

I don't believe that chromosomes look like this, no matter what you say. LA LA LA LA I'm not listening!

Urban Attributes undertakes a synchronic study of
urban areas within Andalusia, and also of local and globally relevant
phenomena which during recent decades have determined and defined ways
of generating a city.

Two complementary work areas have been created together with a
program of parallel activities that will take place in autumn 2006... The first of these work areas includes the study of adjectives and
nouns assigned to the contemporary city by various authors. A glossary of attributes
has ... served to describe urban phenomena from our recent history. ...

To complement this we propose the analysis of five urban areas
affected by intense socioeconomic, infrastructural, and cultural
transformations, i.e.: the Campo de Dalias-Campo de Níjar, the Costa del Sol, the Straits of Gibraltar, the Bay of Cadiz, and the SE30-SE40 district within the metropolitan area of Seville.

Some favorite terms:

Buffer City: Global buffer cities become spaces of transition between
countries and continents, where differences in economic development
cause the uncontrollable decanting of people and businesses. The
interest of the buffer city lies exclusively in the fact that
it is crossed to reach the other side, and this condition of area of
passage, where legal exchange and illegal traffic are more intense,
gives it a high degree of crossovers and social conflict that become
spatially various manifestations of a provisional nature.

Cannibal City: We understand such a city to be one that in the process of its
territorial expansion and growth engulfs any other urban area that it
encounters. This is an organicist characterization of the city, which
resorts to the analogy with natural phenomena to reveal the most
irrational facet of its behaviour. Cannibalism becomes a valid
reference for situations in which the expansion of the city is subject
to the vicissitudes of the free market and the changing interests that
encourage property speculation, which raise doubts about the efficiency
of any regulation, norm, or form of planning.

Surfurbia: Coined by Reyner Banham in his Los Angeles. The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), the term surfurbia
is used to describe the influence that the overwhelming trinomial of
the three Ss (Sun, Sand and Surf) has on the construction of the
contemporary metropolis. In the first place, surfurbia arises
as a habitual process of suburbanization: Since it was founded, the
city of Los Angeles was kept separate from the sea until in the early
20th century the coast became the declared objective of its expansion.
This process, as in the remainder of North American cities, was based
on an alliance with rail companies which permitted easy access from the
downtown area to the first exclusive resorts of the periphery such as
Santa Mónica, created as a result of the growing fondness for bathing
of the Los Angeles bourgeoisie of the late 19th century.

Villa Miseria: Villa Miseria is the Argentinian version of a term that has numerous local equivalents: Favela in Brazil, callampa in Chile, pueblo joven in Peru, katchi abadi in Pakistan, shanty town in Kenya, bidonville in Algeria, township in South Africa, barong-barong in the Philippines, jhuggi
in India, etc. All of them refer to the same phenomenon, the slum
housing that surrounds the large metropolises of developing countries.
The Villas Miseria are unplanned settlements. They appear as
a result of the initiative of a group of citizens (normally from rural
areas) who appropriate furtively and illegally an empty territory
located on the periphery of a large city.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Urban Flora is a project that aims to alter city dwellers' experience of their environment through a series of stickers that identify objects in the urban environment. These "urban flora", such as mailboxes, lamp posts, and fire hydrants, are presented in a traditional taxonomy such as one would see in an arboretum or botanical garden. By defining these man-made artifacts in the context of the botanical world, the project draws attention to the presence or absence of nature in the urban space.

but it's really just a time-spender for urban artsies with too much time on their hands.

Either that, or these people are "artists" who need some "projects" under their belts. That would be indicated by the earnestness of the text. I'd actually prefer the former. My friends and I used to sit around and drink beer and come up with ideas galore for projects. Sometimes we'd even do them, but we mostly just sat around and talked. Doing the projects was problematic because it always required some work, and the projects were always one liners, like this one, so it never felt quite sane to spend 200 hours--or 20 or even two--making something that people would look at for a second, say "huh" about, and then walk away.

But I realize that these sorts of one-off projects are how artists cut their teeth so I'm trying not to be too much of a bitch. And it's a neat idea, for about a second. Then it's just precious. My main issue is art that purports to invite random mans on da streets to "think about" something. Unless the artist is very careful, and very thoughtful, these invitations are more along the lines of demands. Condescending demands that offer an ill-defined idea in the confidence that viewers have never thought of such things before.

Such projects also do all the thinking necessary for engaging with the piece, so that when your two seconds of engagement are up, so is all the thinking around the piece.

The problem here specifically is that this idea requires a great deal more thought and discussion to really give anything new to the random viewer. Pretty much every city dweller has thought, at some point or another, about the lack of vegetation, or wished for more trees or green or just plain shade. Pointing out that we've "replaced" trees and shrubs with hydrants and streetlamps doesn't really cut it--for anyone.

The fire hydrant sticker was starting to get somewhere interesting with its line about hydrants now serving multiple purposes. But the format of the stickers was too brief to allow thought to go anywhere. This could have been solved in a number of ways:

making the stickers a little bigger and giving oneself a little more leeway to spin out fantasies

making a lot more stickers about a lot more objects, and shaping a discussion by sheer accumulation

adding a url to a website that included longer (and maybe not so earnest) discussions about the taxonomy of street furniture, or a map of said street furniture, or a taxonomic table or family tree, or maybe simply an interactive component where viewers could suggest other objects to taxonomize

Sunday, March 25, 2007

wow. Taxonomy sorts out all life on Earth, in the present day, in the future, and all through the past. ... Classes will take us up one further rung. Mammals for example, all suckle their young ... except when they use formula ...

Sunday, December 24, 2006

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.
-- George Orwell

Geography and space are always gendered, always raced, always economical and always sexual. The textures that bind them together are daily re-written through a word, a gaze, a gesture.
-- Irit Rogoff